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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
561–570 of 580 posts
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to find anything wrong with your conclusions except that you're leaving out the part where they're trying to automate our contributions to devalue our skills. I'm surprised there isn't a movement to halt the use of AI for certain tasks in software development on the same level as the active resistance from doctors against socialized medicine in the US. These expensive toys will inevitably introduce catastro…
Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers. And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience. We should not forget that on the other side of this issue are equally smart and motivated people and they too are aware of the power dynamics involved. For example, the phenomena of younge…
> Because other professional fields have not been subjected to a long running effort to commoditize software engineers.
> And further, most other (cognitive) professionals are not subject to 'age shaming' and discounting of experience.
When young people learn that I am a software developer, their eyes light up (thinking that I make huge money working for FAANG). Frequently, they ask if they should also become a software developer. I tell them no, because this industry requires constant self-learning that is very hard to sustain after 40. Then, you become a target for layoffs, and getting re-employed after 40 as a software dev can be very tough.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
This field (SE - when I started out back in late 80s) was enjoyable. Now it has become toxic, from the interview process, to imitating "big tech" songs and dances by small fry companies, and now this. Is there any joy left in being a professional software developer?
It happens in waves. For a period, there was an oversupply of cs engineers, and now, the supply will shrink. On top of this, the BS put out by AI code will require experienced engineers to fix. So, for experienced engineers, I see a great future fixing the shit show that is AI-code.
Each time that I arrive at a new job, I take some time to poke around at the various software projects. If the state of the union is awful, I always think: "Great: No where to go but up." If the state of the union is excellent, I think: "Uh oh. I will probably drag down the average here and make it a little bit worse, because I am an average software dev."
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#564Interesting that every comment has "Help improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative. > This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" t…
At least we can tell the junior developers to not submit a pull-request before they have the tests running locally. At what point does the human developers just give up and close the PRs as "AI garbage". Keep the ones that works, then just junk the rest. I feel that at some point entertaining the machine becomes unbearable and people just stops doing it or rage close the PRs.
> rage close the PRs
One of my all time "rage quit" stories is Azer Koçulu of npm left-pad incident infamy. That guy is my Internet hero -- "fight the power".
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#565[dead]
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#566[flagged]
Fair point, if there wouldn't be so many annoying and false promises before.
Not sure what promises you heard. For me a lot of them came true.
I created images and music which was enjoyable. I use it to add more progress to an indie side project I'm playing around with (i added more functionality to it with ai stuff like claude code and now jules.google than i did myself in the last 3 years).
It helps my juniors to become better in their jobs.
Everything related to sound / talking to a computer is now solved. I talked to gemini yesterday and i interruptted it.
Image segmentation became a solved problem and that was really hard before.
I can continue my list of things AI/ML made things possible in the last few years which were impossible before that.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I see this as a work in progress.. I am almost certain the humans in the loop on these PRs are well aware of what's going on and have their expectations in check, and this isn't just "business as usual" like any other PR or work assignment. >> This is a test. You can't improve a system without testing it on real world conditions. Software developers know to fix build problems before asking for a review. The AIs ar…
Like I said, I think you may be missing the point of the whole exercise.
then the output of the exercise can only be "AI is ignoring errors"
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I expect it will find its niche in development and become actually useful, taking off menial tasks from developers. Reading AI generated code is arguably far more annoying than any menial task. Especially if the said code happens to have subtle errors. Speaking from experience.
This is probably version 0.1 or 0.2. Reviewing what the AI does now is not to be compared with human PRs. You are not doing the work as it is expected in the (hopefully near?) future but you are training the AI and the developers of the AI and more crucially: you are digging out failure modes to fix.
While I admire your optimism regarding those errors getting fixed, I myself am sceptical about the idea of that happening in my lifetime (I'm in my mid 30s).
It would definitely be nice to be wrong though. That'd make life so much easier.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...(if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them) So I keep being told, but after judiciously and really trying my damned hardest to make these tools work for ANYTHING other than the most trivial imaginable problems, it has been an abject failure for me and my colleagues. Below is a FAR from comprehensive list of my attempts at having AI tooling do anything useful for me that isn't t…
just wanted to say this was the most relatable take i have read so far, and i've read a lot. Exact same experiences. And you didnt even touch on the MCP's that enable these things to go wild as well. I think our takes are not being taken seriously for 2 reasons. First marketing gaslighting from the faangs and hot startups with grifters that managed to raise and need to keep the bullshit windmill going. Second is that…
People see that these things generate code and due to their lack of understanding they automatically assume this is all software engineering is.
Then we have the current batch of YC execs heavily pushing "vibe coded" startups. The sad reality is that this strategy will probably work because all they need is the next incredulous business guy to buy the vibe coded startup. There's so much money in the AI space to the point where I fully believe you can likely make billions of dollars this way through acquisition (see OAI buying Windsurf for billions of dollars, likely to devalue Cursor's also absurd valuation).
I'm not a luddite. I'm a huge fan of companies spending a decent chunk of money on R&D on innovative new projects even when there's a high risk of failure. The current LLM hype is not just an R&D project anymore. This is now being pushed as a full on replacement of human labor when it's clearly not ready. And now we're valuing AI startups at billions of dollars and planning to spend $500B on AI infrastructure so that we can generate more ghibli memes.
At some point this has to stop but I'm afraid by that point the damage will already be done. Even worse, the idiots who led this exercise in massive waste will just hop onto the next hype train.
Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane
#570Interesting that every comment has "Help improve Copilot by leaving feedback using the or buttons" suffix, yet none of the comments received any feedback, either positive or negative. > This seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue? This is also my experience when you haven't setup a proper system prompt to address this for everything an LLM does. Funniest PRs are the ones that "resolves" t…
At least we can tell the junior developers to not submit a pull-request before they have the tests running locally. At what point does the human developers just give up and close the PRs as "AI garbage". Keep the ones that works, then just junk the rest. I feel that at some point entertaining the machine becomes unbearable and people just stops doing it or rage close the PRs.
Better yet, deploy their own LLM to close the PRs.